When the London Cemetery Company founded Highgate Cemetery, they envisioned the “garden cemetery” as a place of beauty where Londoners could escape the smoke and dirt of their city. The graveyard offered controlled nature — serene, parklike, safe — beside the wilderness of Hampstead Heath.

In the 19th century, people flocked to Highgate Cemetery. They brought picnics and strolled the lanes, marveling over the wealth of statuary and beautiful greenery. Inspired by the birdsong, they courted here. With thirty funerals a day, people flowed constantly in and out.

The 20th century dawned. England endured World War I, during which one of every three soldiers perished. At the war’s end, the influenza pandemic swept the country, killing thousands. World War II finished the job, wiping out most of a generation of men. By the 1950s, whole families had ceased to exist. No one survived to tend the graves; no money came from new burials in family plots. Without income to pay its army of gardeners, Highgate Cemetery was abandoned to nature.

By the end of the 1960s, Highgate Cemetery was choked with weeds, shadowed by a dense forest of ornamental trees, and colonized by wildlife from the Heath that included foxes, hedgehogs, and rabbits.

In 1968, the overgrown cemetery featured in Taste the Blood of Dracula, one of Hammer Studio’s costume thrillers starring Christopher Lee. Perhaps that inspired the outbreak of vampire hunting that mutilated Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s.

The Friends of Highgate Cemetery formed in 1975, after the cemetery’s owner went bankrupt and padlocked the western half of the cemetery. FOHC volunteers cleared brambles, felled invasive trees, and reopened access to gravesites. Eventually, the Friends bought the entire cemetery. They now offer tours to fund their work. Their schedule is here.

Among the famous dead buried at Highgate lie Karl Marx, as well as authors Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Radclyffe Hall, and Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Other gravesites worthy of social calls include impresario Malcolm McLaren, actor Sir Ralph Richardson, social reformer George Jacob Holyoake (the last man arrested for atheism in Great Britain), William Friese-Green (inventor of “kinematography”), and Carl Mayer (co-author of the screenplay for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), as well as the various balloonists, menagerists, scientists.

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About Loren Rhoads

I'm the editor of Tales for the Camp Fire: An Anthology Benefiting Wildfire Relief. I'm also author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, as well as a space opera trilogy. I'm co-author of a series about a succubus and her angel.

Hi, first of all I would like to say that this is a beautiful picture, as a self published author of crime stories, ‘The Deathly Angel’ and ‘When Angels Feast’ I am always looking for photos of Angels to use as the front covers and this picture caught my eye. If at all possible could I use it as one, I would of course pay for the privilege and credit you in the book like I have with the others, hope to hear off you soon, take care. Kev

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